


Want will steal your breath away....

by kyrieanne



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 23:08:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6133307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrieanne/pseuds/kyrieanne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Whitney Frost, dark matter, and threat of immediate destruction is finished Peggy Carter finds herself considering what's next. Daniel Sousa would like to know too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Want will steal your breath away....

When it’s all over — or rather when there is a moment of pause between this mission and the next — Peggy dangles her feet in Howard Stark’s pool.

Overhead the night sky is inky black. The stars are pinpricked lights stretching impossibly high and shining from unfathomable distances. She thinks of Jason and the night they went to the observatory. That had been a moment like this one, a brief, glorious chance to catch her breath. A flash of peace. Blink and you’ll miss it. Peggy collects these moments; she hoards and lines them up when the latest mission becomes too much. Nights like that one and this ground her and help her remember _why_.

Peggy leans back with her palms stretched out behind her to arch her neck and take in the breadth of the sky. Howard’s estate is far enough out of the city that the modern lights don’t ruin the view. It’s so beautiful, she thinks, this world.

The corners of her eyes sting and she bites her bottom lip to keep it from trembling. Jason is gone.

She can’t even say he’s dead. He disappeared into the dark matter, and the SSR scientists insist there’s no way of knowing what that really means. He fell into a crack in space and time. Peggy guffaws. She has lost two men: one because he was a super soldier and the other to a parallel dimension.

_And yet everyone around you dies._

Out there in the desert the words hung heavy between her and Jarvis, and her immediate thought had been of Michael. He’d died. There was a grave and a folded flag that said as much. With Steve and Jason death hadn’t afforded her the luxury. She hadn’t loved Jason like she’d loved Steve. Steve had been her future. Jason had been something more modest - hope that time really could heal the heart. Both of them had been good. This is the fact that hurts the most: the world had two fewer good men in it under Peggy Carter’s watch.

Tonight, just before retiring with Ana to their rooms, Jarivs pulled Peggy aside.

“Ms. Carter, I must say again -,”

“Mr. Jarvis.” Peggy said, “I’ve accepted your apology. Let us move on.”

“But -,”

“They were just words.”

He’d appraised her then. She pulled the corners of her mouth tight and tipped her head to one side. This pacified him and Mr. Jarvis did leave it at that and made his way up to Ana and their radio shows.

Thus Peggy found herself too anxious to go to bed, but alone with thoughts whirling in her head. She wandered out to the pool, abandoned her shoes, and rolled up the hem of her dusty, wrinkled suit. She picked brambles off the cuffs and frowned at what it’s going to cost her to clean the green ensemble. It was one of her favorites.

And that is how she winds up swirling her feet in the turquoise water under a starry sky. The truth is that it isn’t her brain whirring, but rather her heart. It feels heavy and alone tonight. She muses that is one advantage of being an agent. When each day is a new crisis the sharper emotions, honed like a scalpel, don’t have a chance to rise up.

_I know my value. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t really matter._

She’d said that to Daniel once, and on most nights she believes it. Tonight isn’t one of those nights. Tonight she wants. She wants not to be the woman who loses people. She wants her job to be easier or maybe to be a person who can walk away from it all. She wants to retire upstairs and listen to radio shows with someone. She wants to dip her feet in water more often and wiggle her toes. She wants.

“Jarvis said you might be back here.”

Daniel.

He’s standing behind her. She turns halfway over her shoulder, and she inhales to steady herself as he closes the distance. She hasn’t been crying, but she doesn’t want him to see how close she was. Why she doesn’t want him to know? That she can’t answer.

Daniel drops the crutch and Peggy offers a hand, which he uses to steady himself onto the tiled edge of the pool. His bad leg stretches straight out, hanging above the water. He scoots so that his knees don’t extend over the edge and that sets him a few inches behind her. He can see her better than she can see him and goose bumps trail up her arms as she thinks about that.

Peggy tries to make her voice light. “Whatever brought you out here can wait until Monday. Surely we’ve earned at least a weekend between criminal plots endangering the world?”

He doesn’t answer her, but instead sets to work taking the shoe and sock off his good leg and rolling up his pant leg to dip his foot into the turquoise water. Their feet swirl together in the pool, ripples knocking off one another. Out of the corner of her eye Peggy notices Daniel’s bare leg. It’s covered in dark hair. She notices the high arch of his foot, how much bigger he is to her, and she blushes. It’s strange, she thinks, that she feels like she understands Daniel Sousa, and yet she barely knows him. It feels intimate to be sitting here like this with him, rolled cuffs and bare calves, under the stars, and alone.

“Do you always paint your toes to match your nails?”

Peggy jumps at his question, but raises her feet out of the water, holding them straight like Daniel’s other leg. She scoots back too and this brings them close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off of him.

“A lady never reveals her secrets.” Peggy teases. Daniel laughs and she laughs too. He watches her laugh and there is a shift in the weight of his gaze. She notices him swallow and her eyes flick up to meet his. They look right into one another and Peggy can feel her body stilling. Is this what it feels like to want? Letting herself want feels like a distant memory, vague and overwhelming. And then she breaks her gaze away because she’s afraid she might combust if she doesn’t.

Silence falls between them. She gazes at the stars, he at the swaying palm trees surrounding the pool, and both pretend not to notice the other stealing glances. Eventually a crick builds in Peggy’s neck and she drops her chin down.

“Daniel -,”

“You said you wanted to talk,” he says, “about what happened. Or almost happened. Maybe it’s no big deal to you. I can’t just go on without saying it.”

“Please -,

“I don’t expect anything in return. An aluminum crutch isn’t…it doesn’t matter. Just let me say it once. We’ll never have to talk about it again.”

“I can’t -,”

Daniel ducks his head so he misses the tears welling in her eyes. His are closed as he inhales deep, as if bracing himself. Peggy doesn’t have a word for how sad Daniel looks right now. It chokes her.

“Everyone around me dies.”

His head jerks up, “What?”

“It’s what Mr. Jarvis said in the desert. And he’s right,” Peggy moves forward, away from Daniel, and closer to the edge of the pool. She wraps her hands around the edge and squeezes tight. "It’s always the people who…and who I…and I can’t lose you too. I won’t. I need you.”

She can feel Daniel watching her. She’s not sure what he sees other than a knotted mess of emotions and red lipstick. Tears still roll down her cheeks, but she forces herself to take deep calming breaths. Usually when feelings rise up like weeds, unwelcome, overwhelming, and choking, Peggy punches something or someone to feel better. She throws herself back into work. But tonight they are in-between and anything seems possible.

“I want you.” Daniel says. He seems as bewildered as she by his admission.

“What?”

“I want you,” he repeats. He swallows and Peggy watches his Adam’s apple bob.

“Daniel -,”

He scoots closer to her “That’s not what I came here to say. I came here to say it right. To tell you that I’m in love you. I love you. I do. But that’s not it. I want you. That sounds wrong. Disrespectful. What I’m trying to say,” he pinches the bridge of his nose, “is that I want to be more than in love with you. I want _you_.”

“But we’re agents.”

“So?”

“SO?” Peggy can’t believe him. Of all people she expected him to understand. He should understand loss. “What we want is completely irrelevant. Have you forgotten that Jason pointed a gun at my head -,”

“Of course not. I can’t stop seeing it!” Daniel is angry. He closes the last polite space between them and his thigh is pressed against hers. Peggy squares her shoulders to his and ignores that her foot and his are tangled together in the pool.

“I’m an agent,” she says.

Daniel leans forward “You think I could ever forget that?”

“Men are very good creatures at forgetting what is right in front of them when they are in love,” Peggy looks anywhere but to Daniel. She settles on the pool, "and that includes who the woman is that they love. They forget who she is and make her into someone they want.”

She finishes her speech and focuses on the water. It distorts everything, she thinks. Nothing looks the same in water. Light bends and the eyes play tricks. Peggy Carter is a brave woman, and she’s brave enough to recognize when she’s terrified.

Daniel’s voice, low and intimate, “You never answered my question.”

She looks back up to him. A piece of his carefully combed hair has fallen across his forehead. Her fingers itch and she’s not sure what she’d prefer to do: push it back into place or mess the rest of it up.

“What question?”

“If it had been the other way around would you have let him shoot me?”

“No.”

“Then you do care?”

“So much,” She dares to look at how he hears her words. She feels his intake of breath and the way he tilts his head a few degrees as if trying to absorb the truth. “Too much,” she says.

“Do you think I’ll forget who you are? That I can’t handle who you are?"

Peggy Carter prides herself on being a brave woman so she doesn’t let herself hide behind a lie. “No. I trust you.” She says.

“Then it’s up to you, Peg.”

“What is?”

“To decide. What it is that you want?”


End file.
